Recently, besides a conventional mechanical meter, an image display device using a liquid crystal panel or the like, has been employed as a display device for a vehicular meter panel. The image display device has an advantage of fully controlling a setting of a display design and a layout.
This image display device has been developed into a vehicular display device, which displays a screen such as an area map or road map of an in-vehicle navigation device. However, at times, an area for displaying the screen of the in-vehicle navigation device is smaller than that of a normal in-vehicle navigation device. As a result, characters of names of cities, towns and villages, names of roads, and the like are sometimes illegible to a user.
In an exemplary display of a conventional meter, as shown in FIG. 11, display areas of a meter unit 50 include a water temperature display area 61, a speed display area 62, a shift position etc. display area 63, an engine speed display area 64, a fuel level gauge display area 65, and a navigation display area 66. According to this conventional art, navigation map drawing data (a navigation display character string) is identical with meter map drawing data (a meter display character string). Thus, the character string, which is similar to that of a navigation device, is displayed on the navigation display area 66, which is very limited in area.
Consequently, U.S. Pat. No. 4,812,980 (JP10-091063A) proposes a map display device, which facilitates the user reading the characters.
According to the map display device in U.S. Pat. No. 4,812,980, the single in-vehicle navigation device changes a character string and the number of characters in proportion to the scale of the map, thereby obtaining a map display that is easy to read to the user. However, it does not work together with other devices.
Furthermore, even if character strings are converted, it does not facilitate adequate legibility of the characters, since, for instance, the character strings may be displayed with a part of them overlapped in a screen display of the in-vehicle navigation device of a meter.